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Posted: Aug 17, 2012

A ghost town built for robots

(Nanowerk News) A science project of unprecedented scale begins this month in the New Mexico desert, as a technology firm breaks ground for a model metropolis. Washington-based Pegasus Global Holdings will build a town replete with schools, parks and an airport.

But the intended residents are not people, but robots.

City Lab is an above ground, unpopulated, fully operating, and real-world lab environment representative of a mid-sized American city. It will provide a legacy environment where new technologies can be tested at scale, allowing researchers and manufacturers to manage the unpredictability of product performance before being introduced into the market (click here for a larger image).

The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) will be the first of its kind, in scale and scope, fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies.

The hallmark of CITE is the City Lab, a full-scale, fully functional test city. City Lab will be a representative example of a modern day, mid-sized American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square miles. It will include urban, suburban and rural zones as well as the corresponding infrastructure. City Lab will be pre-wired for data collection giving researchers the ability to simulate system-wide scenarios and then draw data from such activities.

This will provide customers the unique opportunity to test and evaluate technologies in conditions that most closely simulate real-world applications. The planned initial core user application areas envisioned to be tested and evaluated within CITE include, but are not limited to: